Slo-Pitch National Softball Inc., first started offering tournaments to Canada’s slo-pitch community in 1989. SPN offers, to member teams, a Canada-wide qualifying tournament program leading to Regional, Provincial and National Championships in over 22 categories and calibre levels. Slo-Pitch National, along with a dedicated team of volunteers – administer, coordinate and regulate over 950 provincial qualifying tournaments each season across Canada.

The Campaign

With this campaign SPN embarked on a new era for it’s National Slo-Pitch Association to utilize the power of social media the likes of which they nor their community has experienced before. With Slammin Media at the helm, SPN tested the waters focussing on its existing Facebook fans. This three week St. Paddy’s day promotion took the form of a recruiting sweepstakes using the Easypromos viral recruiting mechanism and backed by one promoted post in addition to some very successful organic posts shattering Facebook Edgerank limitations.

The Challenge

Like many membership/event based organizations SPN’s objective is to attract, grow and maintain members of its organisation as well as deliver continued strong results for sponsors. SPN sees a need to achieve this both in the playing and off seasons. To do so fan growth is of key importance as well as conditioning fans to interact and engage with SPN’s social media properties. The ultimate goal is to earn the right to create a large buzz for its tournaments and one off events among its community which represent peak revenue opportunities.

The objective of this contest is a pilot project intended to test engagement capabilities within a sub 5000 fan Facebook community previously experiencing low engagement and low reach per organic post. SPN has a solid opportunity to transition its massive offsite membership to a highly engaged online community benefiting from the viral aspects social media brings to the table.

This small pilot group is intended to provide SPN an indication of what to expect with their full blown community.

The Solution

A Facebook promotion was created using the Easypromos White Label Application fully branded to SPN. Entrants were encouraged to recruit their friends to receive additional chances to win. The winner and alternate winners were generated by the application completely at random taking into account bonus entries for recruiting activity. SPN was able to draw upon its vast sponsorship relationships to provide a desired and relevant prize for its audience. Slammin Media was able to publish the contest to several properties in addition to Facebook including an SPN website embed, Slammin Media website embed and a Pinterest Board Pin.

Facebook Post Campaign

Previous to the contest Slammin Media was not involved in SPN’s Facebook engagement practices. The SPN Facebook page had 4,200 fans who would be characterized as non-interactive.

Slammin Media felt with the right approach these fans could indeed become interactive with SPN content.

Creating the following organic post campaign in conjunction with the call to action of the contest, the SPN Facebook page experienced staggering results.

Prior to these posts, the SPN Facebook engagement was quite a bit lower:

Below is the campaign ‘kickoff post’ viewed by 16,856 people of which 14,200 of views resulted from promoting the post. Important to note, no other posts had been promoted for this contest. No email list was utilized to promote this content.

Throughout the contest Slammin used organic Facebook posts to continue to engage the Facebook community. In this particular post below, organic views hit a staggering 49,312 vs 2656 from the inaugural post. This is impressive for a page of fewer than 5000 fans. Likes, shares and comments followed with a lofty 1300 in total as well as over 11,000 actions on the photo.

The Benefits

SPN was able to benefit from 1,881 new fans, overall page growth of 32% on a total ad spend of approximately $45.00. As a result of this pilot SPN sees the power of fully engaging their large number of members across Canada utilizing social media. They are able to work successfully with partners and sponsors to provide sought after prizes while keeping their own costs well in check.

The Easypromos App and Social Media in the hands of Slammin Media and SPN will provide multiple capabilities for SPN to achieve its social media goals. These include Dynamic Quizzes and Surveys with conditional logic, Coupons with real-time POS validation, Customer Reward applications and continued engagement with giveaways, instant wins and photo based voting contests. Excite

– See more at: http://www.easypromosapp.com/blog/en/2014/05/case-study-%E2%80%93-how-to-move-a-thriving-national-slo-pitch-softball-community-from-its-offline-roots-to-one-of-online-engagement/#sthash.m26KPLPr.dpuf